Scott Manning July 21, 2003 | Comments (2)

It's time to gloat as a recent study in the UK has been published stating that poorly written emails and pointless CCing can cost £10,000 per employee a year. I have been preaching this for years now and now there is proof.

My journey to change the world
Almost two years ago, I made a cry for some email standards with one basic request: Use a sensible subject line.

And this past March, I talked about Carbon Copying Fiends and the trouble they cause.

When new employees are hired under my wing, I send them these two articles to read. I also send these articles to email violators. When someone receives the article about subject lines, the typical response is to send me email with a subject line like so:

"Subject: Email being sent to Scott Manning about Lender questions on March 13, 2003"

Humorous? Sure, the first few times, but everyone does it. It may be annoying, but it is a small price to pay if one person starts using sensible subjects lines on a regular basis.

Doing the math
When people want to pass this sort of thing off as non-important or as me just being anal-retentive, I start showing them some math.

I'll give a real life example. Recently, a co-worker sent out an email about Client A, but titled the email "Client X". I was CC'd on the email along with several other people. One of the people, who happens to be a Carbon Copying Fiend, replied to email without changing the subject line and CC'd three other people. Now we have about eight people talking about Client A in an email change titled "RE: Client X".

Confusing? You better believe it. There were six emails sent out to everyone on the list trying to clear up the confusion.

Now let's say that everyone spent about ten minutes each trying to understand that we were talking about Client A and not Client X. Eight times ten comes to 80 minutes. The average salary between everyone is 20 bucks an hour to 80 bucks an hour. That adds up to several hundred dollars wasted with one poorly titled email.

Got your attention now?

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